It appeared to have come from nowhere but the roots were deep. A half century past the heroic events of Dec. 1, 1955, a catalogue of facts remain firmly planted in our minds: the seamstress who refused to give up her seat, the 26-year-old preacher who led a movement to demand justice. The threats. The bombs. The unyielding 382-day boycott and the eventual triumph that ended Jim Crow in Montgomery, Ala.

It would be easy to believe at this distant point in history that the success of The Montgomery Bus Boycott was all but a foregone conclusion from the moment Rosa Parks made her quiet stand. But in truth there were missteps and stumbles along the way. The limelight of history has shone -- almost exclusively-- on the grand figures of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. But in 1955, they were simply two of the anonymous hundreds of men and women struggling to find their way forward.

And perhaps this is the real significance of Montgomery.

In 1955, the South had witnessed furious attempts to circle the wagons in defense of Jim Crow. In the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Alabama had passed laws requiring all national organizations with branches in the state to divulge its membership rolls -- a policy that had nearly crippled the Alabama NAACP overnight. Emmett Till's body had been brutalized into a grotesque abstraction just three months prior to Parks' arrest and almost every Southern congressman had signed the notorious 'Southern Manifesto' pledging to fight against racial integration.

It was in this context that the boycott began. The hastily formed Montgomery Improvement Association borrowed the idea of a bus boycott from blacks in Baton Rouge, La., who had organized a 10-day protest of segregation two years earlier. They modeled their voluntary car pools after those in Louisiana and began raising funds to provide gas and maintenance. Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College called meetings in the middle of the night to respond to Rosa Parks' arrest and began the initial organizing. These were bold actions in the era of American apartheid: just five years earlier, Harry and Harriette Moore, NAACP organizers in Florida, had been murdered on Christmas Day for attempting to organize blacks in the state.

And contrary to the common perception, the Montgomery Boycott did not originally demand an end to segregation. They initially sought to have the city hire black bus drivers and adopt a more polite -- though still segregated -- seating policy used in other Southern cities. (Thurgood Marshall, fresh from the Brown v. Board victory distrusted the Montgomery Movement. He sought complete elimination of segregation and privately questioned supporting a movement whose goals fell short of that.) It would take months of organizing before the abolition of segregation became the clear focus of the organization.

Nor did the Montgomery organizers accept the assistance of Bayard Rustin, the pacifist organizer who had been fighting segregated transportation since 1947. Rustin, who would later play a key role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, was sent back to New York both out of fear that his status as an "outsider" would harm the movement and that his homosexuality would become a means by which to discredit it. (This was not the last time that Rustin's sexual orientation would become a political issue; years later Adam Clayton Powell threatened to expose Rustin as a bargaining chip he held over Martin Luther King.)

As the boycott stretched on, tensions arose between the Montgomery Improvement Association and the NAACP leadership partially in response to King's meteoric rise to public attention and partly out of disagreements over tactics and fundraising. In short, this was a struggle in every sense of the word.

But at the same time, this is what remains important about Montgomery. Strip away the glory and the sepia lighting and what lies beneath is a group of regular human beings who clashed over strategy, egos and goals and who nonetheless created a movement that delivered freedom to unborn generations of black people. Neither King, nor Parks, Marshall or any of the Montgomery leadership could know precisely where their struggle would lead or how precisely to get there.

Amid the designer pessimism and the disposable media icons that clutter our social landscape in 2005, you can feel the sense that we are collectively waiting for the next Martin or the next Rosa. The years since King's death have witnessed massive black incarceration, persistent poverty and a national truculence that would have deeply unsettled the pacifist preacher. And yet, if Montgomery teaches us anything five decades later, it is that we do not need heroes, but flawed, regular people who are willing to act heroically.

More on the Montgomery Bus Boycott

About the Author
William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of 'The Essential Harold Cruse.' He also posts articles at www.jelanicobb.com. You can reach him at creative.ink@jelanicobb.com.